The Birth of Sense: Generative Passivity in Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy

Author(s): Don Beith Year: 2018 Type: book (Ohio University Press, Series in Continental Thought No. 52)

A systematic reading of Merleau-Ponty's corpus that argues his philosophy is driven from beginning to end by a critique of constituting activity as such — not only of consciousness, but of the vital body. Against interpretations that divide MP's work into an early "philosophy of consciousness" and a late "ontology of nature," Beith demonstrates a continuous deepening of the concept of passivity across three levels: static, genetic, and generative. The book's central contribution is the concept of generative passivity: an ontological origin of sense in nonsense that precedes any constituting activity, understood through the temporal logic of Bergson's "retrograde movement of the true" and the figure of birth as institution of a future.

Core Arguments

  1. Claim: MP's philosophy is a continuous critique of constituting activity, not a two-phase progression from phenomenology to ontology. Because: Already in The Structure of Behavior, MP locates developmental passivity in consciousness and seeks the natural underpinnings of meaning. The concept of "form" gestures at dynamic emergence. The early work is a "propaedeutic for a philosophy of institution" (p. 161), even if the logical terms are not yet fully worked out. Against: The widespread view (Carbone, Madison, Carman) that MP's early work is premised on a "philosophy of consciousness."

  2. Claim: Three progressively deeper concepts of passivity structure MP's thinking — static, genetic, and generative — adapted from Steinbock's tripartite phenomenological method but extended beyond consciousness into nature. Because: Static passivity (organism-environment co-givenness) cannot explain genesis. Genetic passivity (developmental activity) still presupposes constituting activity. Only generative passivity accounts for the emergence of activity from nonactivity. Against: Autopoietic readings (Varela, Thompson) that defer constituting activity from consciousness to the vital body.

  3. Claim: Generative passivity is the ontological precursor to both activity and structure — it names the emergence of sense from nonsense, a "generative temporal openness" and an "aporetic structure." Because: Activity takes time to come into being; at its origin it cannot already be the activity it will become. Birth is the paradigm: "Birth [is not an act] of constitution but the institution of a future" (IP, 8). The organism is a "hollow" of indeterminacy — potency (puissance) rather than capacity (pouvoir). Against: Mechanism, vitalism, autopoiesis — all presuppose a constituting principle.

  4. Claim: Institution (Stiftung) replaces constitution (Sinngebung) as the proper logic of meaning-emergence. Institution names an "instituting-instituted" movement where events retrogressively establish their own conditions of possibility. Because: "Institution makes sense without me" (IP, 77), unlike constitution. Institution operates through prematuration: premature structures prepare without determining. Against: Liberal individualism, social constructivism, Freudian pre-formed sexuality.

  5. Claim: Bergson's "retrograde movement of the true" provides the temporal logic: genuine possibility is organic (a "seed"), not logical (pre-formed). "It is the real which makes itself possible" (Bergson). Because: Jankélévitch distinguishes organic possibility (positive promise, seed) from logical possibility (preformed phantom of the real). The retrospective illusion copies the present into the past. But there is also a genuine becoming-true in time — the past is "provisionally structured" and retrogressively reshaped. Against: Foucault's charge that (a) retrograde movement is mere projection and (b) any orientation in nature posits nature in-itself.

  6. Claim: The organism develops as a "melody" — open-ended, diacritical temporal structure — by taking up and transforming pre-organic rhythms. Embryological evidence demonstrates "enjambment" of space. Because: Axolotl preneural gradients → nervous system; heart tubes → fused, kinked, spiraling organ; amoeba as "continuous birth." Structures are retrospective names for developmental processes. Against: The earlier "melody which sings itself" (Uexküll/SB) which retains self-enacting form.

  7. Claim: Human personality emerges from "syncretic sociability" through institution, not constitution. Puberty marks a divergence, not a realization of pre-given form. Because: Child psychology: infant cannot distinguish self/other; personality is a developmental achievement within the intercorporeal field. Childhood past remains as generative background. Against: Freud; liberal individualism; social constructivism.

Key Findings

  • The distinction pouvoir (capacity, formed power) vs. puissance (potency, generative potential) runs through all of MP's thinking about passivity — the organism's "weakness" is the source of creative possibility
  • Derrida's logic of the supplement parallels institution: the child "speaks before knowing how to speak" — both poverty and prodigy
  • Habit in the Phenomenology of Perception is the hinge between genetic and generative passivity — past habits are the "true present" but are themselves retrospective
  • "Degenerative passivity" is the converse of generative: an "impossible loss of dimensionality" linked to ecological catastrophe (Toadvine's "apocalyptic imagination")
  • Social institutions can be "pathological" — closing down the openness of generative passivity through privilege and oppression

Methodology

Beith adapts Steinbock's tripartite reading of Husserl (static, genetic, generative phenomenology) as an interpretive framework for MP's entire corpus, reading the texts "generatively" — not reducing them to their explicit theses but following the "unthought" possibilities they open. This method itself enacts the logic of institution: reading as "resuming while also transforming a thought."

Concepts Developed

  • generative-passivity — The book's central contribution: the ontological origin of sense in nonsense, a "generative temporal openness" that precedes constituting activity. Distinguished from static and genetic passivity as a third, most radical level.
  • syncretic-sociability — MP's concept from the child psychology lectures, extensively developed here as the intercorporeal matrix from which personality is instituted through childhood and puberty.

Concepts Referenced

  • institution — The book's governing framework; Beith extends it systematically into nature and embryology
  • passivity — Beith adds the three-level framework (static/genetic/generative) as a complementary approach to the "lateral passivity" of the course
  • retrograde-movement-of-the-true — Central temporal logic; Beith adds Jankélévitch's organic/logical possibility distinction and the Foucault rebuttal
  • sedimentation — Linked to genetic passivity and habit formation; the mechanism of the "true present"
  • body-schema — Discussed in context of habit and developmental origins; the "synthesis of one's own body" is itself an institution
  • experimental-platonism — Used extensively as a figure for the becoming-true of organic form through contingent events
  • co-naissance — Resonates with Beith's account of birth as institution
  • coherent-deformation — Beith's "melody" figure parallels MP's use of Malraux's "coherent deformation" as expressive style
  • being-in-and-toward-the-world — Beith deepens être au monde by grounding it in generative passivity

Key Passages

"Birth [is not an act] of constitution but the institution of a future. Reciprocally, institution resides in the same genus of Being as birth and is not, any more than birth, an act: there will later be decisionary institutions or contracts, but they are to be understood on the basis of birth and not the reverse." (IP, 8/[5] 4)

"the melody sings in us much more than we sing it; it goes down the throat of the singer, as Proust says... the body is suspended by what it sings: the melody is incarnated and finds in the body a type of servant" (N, 174/228)

"life is like a pure wake which is not attributable to any boat" (N, 176/231)

"it is the real which makes itself possible, and not the possible which becomes real" (Bergson, Creative Mind, 85/84)

"There is truly a retrograde movement of the true (and not only a retroactive effect of the discovery of the true). The trunk of the circular tree had equal radii, [which means that] manual operations on it would have obtained results which for us presuppose this equality; but this equality as such does not exist absolutely before geometry.... They will hold retroactively." (IP, 52/[55] 42)

"the preneural system of integration 'enjambs' the nervous functioning, and it does not stop with its apparition. The nervous system is thus not the ultimate explanation" (N, 143/192)

"organic possibility, on the contrary, is a positive promise of reality, a hope. Possibility is nothing now, but it will be, [and] we are sure of it.... Organic possibility is already something, but it represents the concentrated state of an existence which will blossom freely in the adult." (Jankélévitch, 217)

"the child cannot limit himself to his own life, hence the phenomenon of transitivism: indistinction between self and other (syncretic sociability)" (CP, 253/318)

What's Not Obvious

  1. The autopoiesis critique is the book's structural backbone, not a tangential disagreement. Beith's argument against Varela and Thompson is not merely that they overstate the organism's activity — it is that any deferral of constituting power from consciousness to the living body reproduces the same logic of constitution at a different level. This connects directly to the passage where MP shifts the melody figure: "a melody which sings itself" (SB/Uexküll) becomes "the melody sings in us" (N) — the inversion marks the transition from autopoietic to institutional thinking about life. The entire first two chapters are structured around this reversal.

  2. The book argues that Merleau-Ponty's relationship to Husserl is an inversion rather than an extension. Where Husserl's generative phenomenology (per Steinbock) reaches the limits of consciousness and finds "organic phantoms" as its negative boundary, MP takes these phantoms as the starting point — generative passivity is not the antechamber of the ego but the very soil of all sense. This means that for MP, unlike Husserl, passivity is not defined ex negativo (as "not yet active consciousness") but positively, as creative potency. This is visible in the passage at IP 123/[216] where MP retroactively comments on what his own Structure of Behavior was attempting: "we sought neither to show the ideality of the body, nor to reintegrate it with consciousness."

  3. The Foucault critique (pp. 87-94) is more than a parenthetical defense — it exposes the deepest stakes of the entire project. Foucault's two charges (that MP either reduces nature to a projection of consciousness or posits it as a reality in-itself) map exactly onto the two failures that any philosophy of constitution produces. Beith's response — that the past is "provisionally structured" and that the retrograde movement is ontological, not merely epistemic — is the most philosophically compressed section of the book and the point where the concept of generative passivity is most rigorously tested. The response works by showing that retrograde-movement-of-the-true is neither illusion nor correspondence but a third mode of truth: becoming-true.

Critique / Limitations

  • The distinction between genetic and generative passivity, acknowledged as "fine" (p. 8), sometimes blurs in practice. Embryological examples (axolotl, heart formation) could be read as dramatic cases of genetic passivity rather than a qualitatively different level.
  • The book does not deeply engage with the flesh ontology of The Visible and the Invisible, which might provide the metaphysical vocabulary (flesh, chiasm, reversibility) that generative passivity needs. The concept of "hollow" resonates with flesh but the connection is underexplored.
  • The political analysis in chapter 4 (bell hooks, Sullivan, Tommie Smith) is evocative but moves quickly; the connection between intercorporeal gesture and structural political change could be more rigorously theorized.
  • Beith's claim that MP's early work already contains the resources for generative passivity risks projecting the later philosophy backwards — a version of the very "retrospective illusion" the book critiques. He acknowledges this methodological tension but does not fully resolve it.

Connections

  • builds on merleau-ponty-2010-institution-and-passivity — the primary source for the concept of institution; Beith's central framework
  • builds on merleau-ponty-2003-nature — the Nature course lectures provide the embryological evidence and the melodic figure
  • builds on merleau-ponty-1945-phenomenology-of-perception — read as the site where genetic and generative passivity are in tension
  • extends merleau-ponty-1968-visible-and-invisible — generative passivity resonates with flesh, though Beith doesn't develop this
  • critiques chouraqui-2021-body-and-embodiment regarding the status of the lived body — where Chouraqui emphasizes the body as a "guide," Beith would insist on its ontological incompleteness (puissance not pouvoir)
  • contrasts with autopoiesis (Varela/Thompson) — the book's primary philosophical foil
  • applies Steinbock's tripartite method to the whole of MP's corpus
  • applies Bergson/Jankélévitch/Al-Saji on temporal becoming to MP's philosophy of nature